Rajni Perera

An armoured figure moves across a painted expanse of time, unbowed, sovereign, carried forward into a century that has not yet arrived; she is an emigrant, and Rajni Perera has painted her as a being of the future rather than a casualty of the past. The ‘Traveller’ series casts diasporic people not as arrivals to be pitied but as figures who move on their own terms, and it is the clearest statement of an art that takes the condition of leaving one country for another and reimagines it as strength rather than loss.

The reimagining is drawn from a life. She was born in 1985 in Colombo and raised between Sri Lanka, Australia and Canada before settling in Toronto, where she lives and works; that itinerary, three countries before adulthood, is the material her practice keeps returning to. She took a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drawing and Painting at OCAD University in Toronto and was awarded its Medal for Drawing and Painting in 2011, and while still a student she began to look hard at the miniature tradition, using its conventions to think through the politics of the coloured body.

Her work is multidisciplinary, spanning painting, drawing and sculpture, and it gathers an unusually wide field of reference: science fiction, fantasy and magic realism, medieval armour, ethnography, deities and monsters, all set against the flat saturated colour and close finish of Mughal and Indian miniature painting at its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century height. The themes that run through it, gender, identity, hybridity and the immigrant body, are treated with irreverence towards the categories that would fix any of them in place; she paints quickly, yet the images hold a dense, deliberate detail, and their futures are built from the deep past. The armoured traveller is the answer she offers to a world that reads migration as diminishment, a body dressed for a future it means to outlast.

That answer has been widely recognised. She held her first survey, ‘Futures’, at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in 2022, and has shown at Fondation Phi in Montreal and at Tramway in Glasgow, both in 2020, at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa and the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina in 2019, and at the Colombo Art Biennale and Art Dubai in 2016. She was a finalist for the Sobey Art Award for the Ontario region in 2021 and received the MOCA Toronto Award in 2022, the York Wilson Endowment Award in 2019 and the Sauer Art Prize at the Armory Show in 2023; her work has entered the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, which acquired ‘Fresh Air’ from the Traveller series, and the National Gallery of Canada. She is represented by Patel Brown in Toronto, Galerie Hugues Charbonneau in Montreal, and Saskia Fernando Gallery in Colombo, the last keeping the line back to the island of her birth.

Rajni left Colombo as a child and made her life across an ocean, and out of that displacement she has built a body of painting in which the ones who leave are the ones who prevail. The armoured traveller who opens the work stands, in the end, as a kind of self-portrait: the emigrant dressed not for arrival but for a future she intends to outlast.